


Three Lies at a Funeral

by Mornelithe_falconsbane



Category: Naruto
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-03
Updated: 2019-06-03
Packaged: 2020-04-07 01:49:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19075027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mornelithe_falconsbane/pseuds/Mornelithe_falconsbane
Summary: Waking up is a mystery.





	Three Lies at a Funeral

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fencesit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fencesit/gifts).



He wakes in darkness, and it takes Madara longer than he thinks it should have to realize that it’s not because it’s dark.

The raw ache in his eyes when he tries to blink, and the blood dried on his face when he raises his hands to touch his eyelids is a sudden dread that ends in surreal shock. They left his eyelids. _That’s good_ , Madara thinks with a strange calm that he doesn’t understand. He’d seen clanmates who’d been left without them.

It hurts to touch, so Madara stops. His skin is warm, and birds are singing. It’s broad daylight, he thinks. In a forest, under the trees. He can hear the leaves rustle, feels dense underbrush when he carefully reaches out. Thorns press against his bare palm, the scrape of them sharp and strange. His gloves are missing.

He breathes out and the air passing through his throat comes out as a choked off gasp.

Where is he? What _happened_?

Madara is a weak sensor at best--anything outside ten feet of him is ghostlike and sometimes his imagination straining to make sense of fragments more than anything. He resorts to it now, barely breathing as he listens and scents the air, stretches his sensing to its limits.

He hears leaves and birds and a stream, maybe. He smells blood and charred hair, and of his own sweat gone sour. Fear sweat is rank, and Madara reeks of it.

The faintest glimmer of chakra lims the living branches and trees, but it takes Madara over a minute to find it, half slipped into a meditation trance. He tries to cling to the details when he stands, but the details escape his as pain shoots through his feet and legs, coiling into a new home in his spine.

Madara stumbles and falls, biting his lip to keep from crying out as branches rake his face, the pain sending stars into the nothing field where his vision should have been. He reaches down, finding his feet bare and his soles torn and still sluggishly bleeding.

He doesn’t remember running. He doesn’t remember his eyes being stolen. He doesn’t remember _who did this_ , and the thought makes Madara want to break something.

All he remembers is this: he was returning from a solo mission, and it had started to rain. Madara had sighed, and then--he’d woken up here.

When an Uchiha’s eyes were stolen, they were alive. The sharingan deactivated with death. But someone leaving them alive _after_ \--that was rare. There were no more than twelve survivors in the clan, and most of them had been left for dead. Madara prods his throat with careful fingers and finds it whole and uncut. His body hurts, but he doesn't feel like he could have been nearly fatally injured.

His clothes are wet, and the dampness isn’t sticky enough to be blood. He must have crossed the stream he can hear. Madara frowns, feels a twinge of _emptiness_ as his face shifts, and then rolls onto his knees and crawls toward the sound of water. He needs to find his way home, and all rivers in fire country lead to the Nakano eventually.

Branches catch in his hair as Madara makes his way through the dense bushes, and he finds every thorns and rock with his hands and knees. His armour is as missing as his gloves and shoes, his sword, his supplies.

Madara isn’t even sure that he’s wearing his own clothes.

What feels like half a tree tangles in his hair and then snaps off, and the ground under his hands abruptly disappears. Madara reaches down, cautiously, and finds water--barely moving, and warmer than he’d expected. A braid of the river, perhaps. He can hear it much more clearly now.

Something moves behind him, and Madara flattens himself against the ground, desperately dragging his chakra tight inside his skin. Grass and dead leaves press against his skin, so much louder than they should be, and Madara stops breathing for a long ten seconds before he gains a muddy impression of a rabbit about five feet behind him.

Madara mutters a curse, relief like a physical weight off his bones, and pulls himself into the water.

***

The sky is turning to purple when Tobirama looks up from his seal work, carefully puts down his brush, and stares into the air for a solid minute before he rises to his feet.

He heads south first, to where he can feel Hashirama’s chakra moping in a grove of trees that hadn’t existed a few days ago. A shrine, Tobirama had called it half in jest, all in seriousness. Hashirama has more sake than Tobirama cares to acknowledge, and two cups. No company, of course.

Halfway to his brother, Tobirama pauses, sighs, and goes to pick up three sets of travel packs from the new quartermaster, who still won’t meet his eyes. Tobirama grimly doesn’t notice that.

He seals them into his wristband as he continues, his attention split between the grim misery of Hashirama’s chakra and the confused and faltering chakra on the furthest edges of his awareness. He paused by the hospital to pick up a first aid kit, sending it into his seal with the travel packs.

The setting sun is a relief for his eyes, the flickering lights of fireflies familiar reminder of where the tree line is. It’s moved since Hashirama last faced the Uchiha in battle, and found Izuna as their clanhead. Saplings were starting to encroach on the fields, and Tobirama had been discreetly asked to take care of it no less than five times by three different elders.

He hadn’t done anything. Not yet. Hashirama was grieving, and as much as Tobirama had thought it was over nothing...Tobirama had not wanted to say so.

“Tobirama,” Hashirama said as Tobirama walked inside his shrine of trees, his voice a little too clear, too sharp. “I asked that you leave give me this time, at least.”

“To the west, by the river,” Tobirama says, equally formal. “There’s a chakra that feels like Madara’s.”

Hashirama’s chakra twists in the darkness, incredulous, shocked, then doubting. “Are you certain?”

“If it is him, his chakra stores have been drained to embers, so no, I am not _certain_. But his chakra is distinct, and so.” Tobirama shrugs, and hopes, quietly, that Hashirama will make this decision. He has told him.

“Tobirama--” Hashirama staggers to his feet, and the scent of sake sears Tobirama’s nose. “We’ll go now.”

Tobirama nods, safe in the knowledge that Hashirama’s night vision is not nearly as terrible as his. “I picked up packs and a first aid kit on my way here. We can leave immediately.”

Tobirama only hears him trip, his chakra sensing dulled by the sheer weight of Hashirama’s chakra. He shifts to the side, hears Hashirama crash into the grass beside him. “Are you okay?” he asks quietly, considering whether he should crouch down and actually check.

Hashirama moans, and he sounds more like himself than he has in days. “I’m _drunk_.”

“Yes you are.”

“New plan, bring him here,” Hashirama says, not even trying to get up. “I’ll. Build him a house. So he can be safe and _not dead_. We’ll eat breakfast together every day. And dinner. I’ll..I’ll comb his stupid hair. It’s so messy, he can’t really like it like that.”

Tobirama mumbles something that sounds like agreement, but isn’t. That’s a terrible order, and Hashirama will probably realize that when he sobers up.

“I’ll investigate,” Tobirama says out loud, and clearly, so Hashirama will actually remember tomorrow. “Go home, Hashirama.”

He leaves then, heading back the way he came without Hashirama, but with the orders he needed. With any luck, Hashirama will remember them in the morning, and Tobirama won’t come back to people thinking he deserted. Again.

***

Birds sing, frogs croak, crickets and cicadas scream, but it is quiet in the forest of the contested lands. No one but Uchiha and Senju dare to enter it, and even then, they tread lightly. Both clans ancestors were buried here, to the east and the west of a shrine so old and ill-treated that it had nearly rotted down to its stone foundations. Tobirama once thought that the graves of his grandparents were worth dying for, but he had been very young then. 

The chakra in the air is thick enough to choke on, so undisturbed that Tobirama can still sense the three month old battlefield where they'd last fought the Uchiha, the fading vortexes of ninjutsu like stars in the night's sky.

The dim glow of animals and plants surround him, and water trickles under dense moss, lit shining silver in Tobirama's chakra sense. He's often wondered if it is his affinity for water that made it so vivid, but there's no one else with sensing like his to ask. If his soul had been bound to earth and water as Hashirama's, would it have been the ground below him that glowed?

Tobirama enjoys being here. It's a weightier kind of being alone, a solitude with armed with teeth and memories of too many deaths, but it's easy on his mind. The Senju clan lands are sprawling, fields and orchards between every home, interlaced with wide meadows of flowers that are guarded as dearly as their children, but Tobirama has never felt alone there.

Here, though he can feel the warmth of Hashirama's chakra in the distance, the distant hum of the Uchiha compound, the even more muted song of the Senju (too loud, but still home), it is a quiet whisper instead of a roar. And like an ember under ashes, Madara's chakra glimmers, deep within the lands of no one.

His chakra is weaker than it usually was, dim enough that Tobirama had nearly discounted it as just another Uchiha in the forest before he’d recognized the signature for Madara’s. He’d thought about ignoring it--he ignored so many things his chakra sensing told him--but the thought of Hashirama’s devastated face upon learning Tobirama had known and done nothing...

Tobirama scowls at nothing and walks faster. If checking on his brother’s most ill-considered friend drags Hashirama from his grief, then it will be a task worth doing. The delegation from Uzushio would arrive in a month, and Tobirama doesn’t believe in luck enough to imagine Hashirama would stop grieving for the bastard Uchiha by then.

If Tobirama isn’t completely mistaken, Madara is floating downstream with the river--heading towards Tobirama and after him, the Senju clan. Reason to investigate even without Hashirama taken into account. Tobirama adds it to his mental list of justifications, and finds it adds up slightly better now.

The moon is a muted silver through the break in the forest canopy, the river lazily winding to Tobirama’s left. It’s waxing, still a narrow crescent after yesterday’s new moon. Beyond it, Tobirama assumes, are stars. To Tobirama, the sky was always a smooth and empty black--the pinholes of light that Hashirama had described were about as real to him as the tales of Kaguya.

If he could not see stars, then at least he could see the moon. Tobirama is not crippled. And even if he was, even then--he can sense chakra better than anyone has in the last three generations. There is no cause for concern.

The deer trail he’s been following ends abruptly, the river bank beneath his feet having crumbled into the water. Tobirama feels the water splash against the banks beneath him and knows to avoid the gap he has no hope of seeing. He jumps across, landing in grass that shimmers with its own quiet light, and then stops there, abruptly realizing that he’s out of trail to follow.

Irritated, Tobirama stretches out his focus, hunting down Madara again. The Uchiha is somehow even shorter on chakra than he’d been five minutes ago when Tobirama had checked on him last. He’s also surprisingly close.

Tobirama steps off the bank onto the swirling silver waters. He’d seen an ocean clan walk this way, and defeated them by draining every drop of water from the lake they stood on into his jutsu. Then he’d figured it out for himself. 

His toes dip under the water as his focus falters, and Tobirama drags his thoughts back inward, steadying the chakra flow in his feet with haste born out of many, many dunkings. Hashirama had thought it was hilarious right up until Tobirama had actually walked on the water like it was dry land. Then he’d wanted to learn.

He heads towards the sandbar that divides the river, not trusting his concentration to keep him above the water and track Madara's chakra at the same time.

The sand sinks under his weight, sucking his sandals in, and Madara disappears from Tobirama's senses. He hears a burbling splash upriver, which he'd assume was a fish if he were a less suspicious soul.

Madara must have seen him. Tobirama scowls in the general direction of the Uchiha who didn't even have the manners to be unconscious, and studies the chakra all around them. Madara is dangerous, but more likely to try to escape when he was at a disadvantage than to fight to the death over two scraped ryu--Tobirama wishes the same were true of Izuna. Madara’s brother would fight to the death to prove the sky wasn’t blue, given half a chance.

A faintly dimmer blob of chakra--the same silver as the water, blood nearly indistinguishable from it when a body's chakra was gone or hidden--alerts Tobirama to Madara's position, only a few meters from his. 

"Madara."

There is no response, but it would be a poor job of hiding if Madara gave up on it so soon.

"Hashirama has asked that I..." Tobirama hesitates for the longest second, then finishes without the help of the truth. "He wanted me to ensure that you were well." Hashirama's strong and persistent desire to kidnap Madara was, perhaps, creepy.  "And I cannot allow you to swim into the Senju compound."

Madara's chakra stirs at that, so weakly that Tobirama questions whether Madara is truly  _ hiding _ his chakra. "Madara?"

The faint chakra in the water pulses softly, floating beneath Tobirama's feet, and Tobirama sighs. If he gets stabbed for this, then stabbed he will be. He drops to one knee, nearly sliding through the surface of the river, and plunges his arm into the water.

A thick mass of threads unfurls around his fingers and grips Tobirama's wrist with startling force. He jerks back before he remembers Madara's massive--and apparently hideously tangled--mane of hair. Tobirama scowls at the water, watching Madara's chakra fade away, and tries again, reaching shoulder deep to grip a fistful of cloth and use it to drag Madara to the surface.

The moon silvers the water, Madara still not even attempting to stab Tobirama. Something is horribly wrong about that. 

Madara gasps in air, thrashing for a half second before he goes limp again, his breathing echoing over the sound of the water, the frogs, the distant crickets. It's quiet here, the darkness a silence of its own between them.

Tobirama shakes Madara cautiously before he concludes that Madara is either playing dead or unconscious, yet somehow undrown in spite of that.  _ How inconvenient.  _ Tobirama grabs blindly in the dark water until he finds Madara's arms, and then hauls the larger man out of the river and over his shoulder.

Madara flops across Tobirama's shoulders, his soaking wet hair slapping Tobirama's knees, and Tobirama carefully heads towards the banks.

**Author's Note:**

> Changed the title and the tags. Sorry if you clicked again, nothing to see here!


End file.
